Two Halves of a Fallen Angel
by DiamondNinja914
Summary: Two hundred years from now, humans will fight their own wars. Since Maka Albarn went Kishin, meisters and weapons will live in camps, oblivious to their abilities, until a rebel group led by Kami awake the Spartoi from their icy slumber. Sortof AU, just future/mild dystopian. T for disturbing ideas.
1. Angel of Fear

_Prologue: Cara_

The museum was cold.

It was cold, and the walls and the tile were white, and I was afraid.

I knew I shouldn't be here, but I stood with the other seven-year-olds and looked at my feet. The excited chatter buzzed in my ears, and I felt a little sick. My ears rang, and I touched my fingers to my thumbs, one by one. Mama always told me not to do that, but I never listened to her. When I didn't touch my fingers, the buzzing got worse, and then I didn't know what would happen if I didn't make it stop.

I never felt like listening to Mama. Somehow, I felt no reason to. Most people wouldn't even think we were related if you looked at us. But I was a good little girl, and I followed directions(mostly), because I was too afraid of what would happen if I didn't.

Looking around, I didn't see a single person I could honestly say was my friend. I was pretty good at judging people, and somehow no one in my class seemed... enough. They smiled and laughed and talked about their favorite holo-shows, but that was all they ever did.

The guide lady looked down at us, smiling warmly. Something in that smile felt right, though. Like she was looking into my soul, and sending rays of sunshine right in.

I couldn't help it; I smiled back.

"All right, boys and girls!" She said, still smiling. "Is everyone excited to be here?" The class cheered, but I didn't. I looked down at my shoes again.

I wasn't excited to be here.

"That's wonderful," the guide lady told us, but she sounded... sad? I don't know. Maybe it was too cold. That was it.

"Well, if everyone gets into a line, we can start!" She was smiling again, but there were no rays of sunshine.

Most of the time, I stayed at the back of the class. Not this time. I ran to the front, and stood by the guide lady. She was nice. Besides, I knew my teacher, Mrs. Trent, would stand at the back of the line when we went on field trips, so I wanted to stay away from her. She didn't like me so well; I got the feeling she thought I was weak when she looked at me.

Maybe I was weak. I was afraid of an old lady.

The guide lady started walking, and I had to trot to keep up with her. I felt... better, I guess, when I was close to her. I didn't know why, but I did. Not as afraid.

"Okay, raise your hand if you know about the five species," the guide lady said enthusiastically. I raised my hand, and so did the rest of the class. "Wow, all of you? That's surprising. I've never seen so many hands before," she laughed.

"I made sure all of them knew from their first day in my class," Mrs. Trent said. She had been our teacher since pre-kindergarten, and she would mentor all of us until we were deemed ready to go on to our next teacher. Class One was age four and up, and covered basic history, reading, writing, and simple mathematics. Class Two was more of the same, extending to some science. Then, Class Three was still more of the same, with a few more subjects. After that, a child chose which class to next go into, out of a group of several dozen subjects, and what class they went into then would tell which jobs they could have.

We were supposed to be learning about a lot of stuff in Class One, but Mrs. Trent mostly taught us about history. She liked Human History a lot.

One thing she never told us, though, I learned from Daddy: the way schools were set up was a mix of how it was for humans two hundred years ago, and how it was at the DWMA.

"Hmm..." the guide lady sad, dramatically placing one hand on her hip, and the other on her chin in an over exaggeration of curiosity. "I wonder if any of you can name all of the five species."

Most of the seven-year-olds started waving their hands in the air. A few of them turned the hovers on their shoes way up so they would seem taller, and have a better chance of getting picked.

"No hovers in the museum!" The nice guide lady said, and everyone reluctantly settled back to the floor. She looked at me. "How about you? Can you name the species?"

"I didn't raise my hand," I mumbled, embarrassed and afraid of getting the answer wrong.

"I bet you know them. Come on," the guide lady said, smiling a real smile again.

"O... Ok. Um, humans," I said, counting down on one hand. "Meisters, weapons, witches, and shiniginami." I stumbled over the last word. The way I saw Mrs. Trent looking at me, I knew I'd gotten the name wrong again.

The guide lady laughed, flipping one side of her golden hair over her shoulder. "That's right. Good job. What's your name?"

"Cara," I said, looking down at the floor.

"What was that?"

"Cara!" Louder this time.

"Well, good job, Cara." She led us through the museum lobby to the wide double doors that opened to a circular room with seven hallways branching out. "Welcome to the Museum of Human History!"

My heart started beating in my ears. _Get out, get out, get out, get out_ repeated endlessly in my head, and I inched closer to the guide lady. I felt better. She looked down and saw me next to her, and suddenly, without warning, my fear was almost gone. Like magic.

"Let's start at the very beginning. It's a very good place to start," she said in a sing-songy voice, laughing. No one laughed with her, and she got that sad expression again. "This hallway here," she pointed to the hallway most to the right, "contains _all sorts _of information about what it was like back when everyone who was mortal was human. I mean-" she sighed. "Sorry. I mean, do you guys know what _mortal _means?"

Just me.

I raised my hand. Maybe I could get Mrs. Trent to like me better if I looked smart.

"It means somebody who can die."

"Exactly," said the guide lady. She looked down at me, and I sensed she felt proud. When I looked back at Mrs. Trent, though, she pretended she didn't notice. I could tell she was only pretending, though.

She didn't like me because I was quiet, and she thought I was weak. She had told everyone that we had to act strong, because we were human, and humans had regained their freedom to fight for themselves, so it was our responsibility to do so. I didn't understand why that meant being loud and obnoxious all the time.

We walked down the first corridor, and right before the lobby got out of view, I saw another group of students come in through the teleport. They were led by a small, dark-haired young woman with her hair tied back into a braid.

Come to think of it, all of the museum attendants with long hair had theirs in a braid down their back. Except our guide. She had her blonde hair down, and it cascaded over her shoulders, and only one honey-colored eye showed. She was also a little older than the other workers. Maybe she'd been here longer. I didn't know.

The slick white walls had holes in them, square and perfect to show smart glass-encased boxes with odd objects in them. An old, worn bandage, a spider that had been preserved in quick-dry syrup. Odd things. Slideshows danced across glass screens, and holographic guides made to look like Alexander the Great, Buddha, and King Arthur stood beside exhibits and talked, or walked around. Some even patted a shoulder as someone walked by. The museum wasn't very busy, and every word spoken echoed through the halls.

"Eight hundred- sorry. Let me start over," began the guide lady. "A thousand years ago, humans thought they were alone on the planet. They..." blah blah blah blah blah. Mrs. Trent wasn't kidding when she said she'd made us learn Human History since day one. We all knew that witches and shinigami worked together to make the first meister/weapon teams, including Asura, Eibon, and Death himself.

"The first demon weapon ever was the Holy Sword Excalibur," the guide lady went on. "No one really knows how he was created, but the idea for human weapons came from him. He took the form of an odd, anteater-like creature while not in combat, but was able to aide many young men and women when they were in need of supernatural assistance." Her expression turned to that of disgust as the hologram of King Arthur raised his jewel-encrusted sword to the sky, then put it to his side, a cartoonish... thing taking its place next to the king. I thought I heard the guide lady gag a little, but I wasn't sure.

"Anyways, Excalibur was the only non-human living weapon-" she was cut off.

"No," said Mrs. Trent. "None of those weapons were human. There's a reason the two species are considered separate legally."

"Oh!" The guide lady exclaimed, turning to look at Mrs. Trent, her left eye being exposed for just a moment. It was closed completely. Like she had injured it and never gotten it fixed. That's odd. Why didn't she just order a new eye? Or clone herself and transfer her consciousness into the new body? This lady was a little weird. I didn't even recognize her accent.

"Of course. But the first weapons were a fusion of regular humans and inanimate objects, and Excalibur was not. We consider weapons to be a humaniod species." The guide lady eyed Mrs. Trent with a degree of annoyance, but I could tell she was holding back. Something about what my teacher had said infuriated her. I spent the rest of our time in that hallway thinking about what it was that made me think the guide lady was different, but I couldn't tell what it was.

The next hallway was about the DWMA.

"Shibusen, or the Death Weapon Meister Academy, was a school founded by the Grim Reaper in Nevada. It was a home for many weapons and meisters after the Houdini Law was passed."

The kids looked around at each other, murmuring. "What's that?" One kid shouted

The woman blinked for a moment. "Oh. I would have thought you all already knew that, since you're such a smart group of children."

The thing was, Mrs. Trent didn't teach us so much about the DWMA.

"Well, the Houdini law stated that all non-humans must attend Shibusen for a few years, in order to learn to control their abilities. Sometimes children might accidentally activate their weapon gene, and even hurt someone on accident. So we- the teachers at the DWMA would help them." She smiled at us until we nodded that we understood.

I saw that many of my classmates were watching videos or playing games on their eye screens. They couldn't pay attention for ten minutes? Seriously.

There were some pictures of the school. It was… beautiful. It had giant spikes and candles sticking out in an array that was even on each side. Symmetrical. Red, black, and white. Now, no country could even have those colors on their flag.

The next hallway was about meisters.

"There were several types of wavelengths," the guide lady explained, "That could be controlled by either species." Somehow, I got even more queasy, and I began fidgeting more feverishly. I clung to the nice lady until I felt better.

She explained that the healing wavelength took away fear, the madness wavelength could infect someone's mind and cause them to go insane, and the exorcism, also called demon slayer wavelength, could combat the madness.

"Can anyone name one famous person who carried the madness wavelength?" The guide lady asked. Everyone knew this one. It was like asking everyone's birthday.

"Maka Albarn," said the boy she called on. Mrs. Trent nodded at him.

"Very good," the lady said. "Does anyone know which she had before she went insane?"

No one knew that one. We just knew she'd snapped one day.

"Actually, she was an exorcist. She was supposed to be immune to insanity." Everyone was confused at this. It sounded impossible.

"Pop question: who knows how come she went mad?" She eyed each one of us in turn. I tentatively raised my hand.

"Cara?"

"Her weapon died," I whispered.

"Well, not technically," the lady began. "She found her scythe in weapon form by the side of the road, with his soul missing from his body. No one knows what happened. But after that, she didn't have enough energy from her weapon to control her demon slayer wavelength anymore, and she went mad." She swallowed painfully and went on. "And then... and then she spread the madness to the rest of her squad, the Spartoi, the most elite students in the DWMA."

There was a holo-statue in the middle of the floor of a bunch of meisters holding their weapons. I slowly read each name in turn.

_Maka Albarn with her scythe, Soul Eater_

_Blackstar Barrett with his shadow arm, Tsubaki Nakatsukasa_

_Death the Kidd with pistols Elizabeth and Patricia Thompson_

_Kirikou "Kilik" Rung with Pot of Fire and Pot of Thunder_

_Ox Ford with electric lance Harvar D. Eclaire_

_Kimial "Kim" Deihl with lantern Jacqueline O'Lantern-Dupre_

_Crona Makenshi with longsword Ragnarok Makenshi_

_Akane Hoshi with greatsword Clay Sizemore_

_Meme Tatane, autonomous meister_

_Anya Hepburn with halberd Tsugumi Harudori_

Some of the other kids were still trying to read the first few names by the time I was completely done. Most gave up.

"The squad started with just the first six, but as their success grew the last four teams were added," the nice guide lady explained. "Who knows where the Spartoi are now?"

No one knew this one.

"They are frozen in cryosleep under what used to be the DWMA." I sensed that a huge emotional toll came with these words for the nice lady. "They were captured and frozen just in case they were ever needed one day, as were the top Deathscythes for all of the countries, each in their own headquarters. The American ones were taken to the other continents."

There was a holographic display of all of the Deathscythes and their meisters, but the lady took us right by it and for some reason wouldn't even let us look. It was subtle, and only Mrs. Trent and I noticed.

"After the United States government saw just how dangerous meisters and weapons could be, all of them were rounded up, whether they were soldiers or just members of society, and taken to camps." We rounded the corner into the next hallway. "Now, they are raised in what used to be Death City, never knowing the power within them. Now, all of our world is human, and we fight with weapons we forge ourselves. The races we once trusted with our safety are fed simple foods and bred according to traits considered desirable in case of an emergency. All lineages are recorded. However, scientists suspect that ignoring those traits for so many generations may have caused the traits to become dormant, perhaps permanently." The lady's speech pattern had changed. I looked up.

She was now reading off of a script on her eye screen.

She didn't seem used to having one. In fact, she was so distracted that she tripped, knocking me over with her.

"Cara!" Mrs. Trent called. "Why don't you come stand with me?" She gestured to the place next to her in line.

"It's fine," the guide lady said. "I just lost my footing for a moment, that's all." She laughed a little.

"That may be true, but I still want Cara to come stand with me." She looked at me meaningfully.

So I did. And the moment I left the guide lady's immediate area, I started shaking.

This next hallway focused on weapons.

"Weapons could begin to show their abilities anywhere between the ages of three and fifteen; a lot of the time they were identified by their family doctor."

"What's a doctor?" One kid asked.

"Someone who was responsible for making sure people's bodies were in good condition. Like your medbots, but a person."

"Oh."

"Anyways, if they didn't find out from their doctor, they could start to show their abilities completely by accident. Maybe their hands turned into blades, or they shot fire, or something like that. It usually was triggered by a moment of great emotional stress."

The guide lady smiled a bit fondly at a portrait of a Japanese lady with shortish hair and glasses.

"This is Yumi Azusa, head of the East Asian department of Shibusen." She told us about how she had had the ability to speak to people in their minds, as well as tell the layouts of buildings they were in. It was called Senrigan.

"What's that?" A boy pointed to a hallway that branched off of this one. The sign read "ARMORY". I think I was the only one who could read it, though.

Almost the entire class started asking if we could go down to the mysterious corridor.

"Let's go," said Mrs. Trent, not asking the guide lady for approval.

_Don't go don't go don't go._

I tried to catch up to the guide lady, but Mrs. Trent held me back.

We rounded into the corridor, and I caught a glimpse of my own pale green eyes in the reflection of the blade of a sword. Looking around, I saw the hall was lined with weapons of every shape, size, and color, with tiny labels underneath each.

"These are the captured weapons who were bound and subjected to radiation until their souls died. Most of them are two hundred years old." The guide lady's voice broke, but no one was listening. The seven-year-olds ran up and down the hallways, giggling and pointing. Why was I the only one that felt so sick?

"Look at that one," Mrs. Trent said, pointing to a pair of nunchuks with deep pink and blue swirls. "She had the same name as you." Then my teacher walked away to scold the other children.

I think that was when I noticed that not only were my hands twitching more than usual, but they felt really funny. I looked at them, and I saw that they were covered in something shiny.

No they weren't.

They were made of metal.

_Sometimes they could start to show their abilities completely by accident. Maybe their hands turned into blades, or they shot fire, or something like that. It was usually triggered by a moment of great emotional stress._

Suddenly the guide lady was crouching in front of me, with her hands on my shoulders. She spoke slowly and carefully, and I felt…. calm.

"I got my powers when I was seven, too. I was in the first grade, and my class was watching the movie 'Marley and Me'. It's like, a picture that moves but doesn't come off the page. Anyways, it was about a dog."

Why wasn't I afraid anymore?

"In the end, the dog died, and I cried."

Oh, yeah.

"And I saw that something was wrong with my desk."

The healing wavelength.

"I looked down and I saw that my hands were sparking."

It takes away fear.

"And then I saw that I had been shocking the metal part of my desk. And I was so, so scared. But one day I was so glad that my hands had started sparking that afternoon. I didn't want to be human anymore, ok?"

She was looking me right in the eyes.

"Hey!" Mrs. Trent called to the nice guide lady. "What are you doing, touching my students?"

"Relax," the lady called. "I used to be a teacher like you."

She looked me in the eyes again and whispered to me. "Remember Azusa? The one who could talk to people in their minds?"

I nodded.

"Oh, really?" Mrs. Trent asked the lady. "Which class did you teach?"

The lady stood up and faced the old woman.

"The E.A.T. Class."

Mrs. Trent's eyes widened as the lady brought her hands together and electricity began crackling between them. One hand turned to a metal-ish rock.

She looked down at me again, and touched two fingers to the side of her head. "This is her. Her name is Cara."

_Hello, Cara._

The voice came from all around, but inside me at the same time.

_This is Azusa. I need you to listen to what I say and do exactly what I tell you. Ok?_

"Ok," I said, and the lady nodded at me.

_Run down the hallway, away from where you came in._

I did, and while I ran I heard the lady speaking again.

"When I was human, my name was Marie Whitlock. When I found out I was a human weapon, I changed my last name to Mjolnir. First I helped my meister teach Duel Arts, and then I taught Wavelength control to Spartoi. I was the one Maka Albarn's roommate called when she heard the screams. I was the one that had to watch each and every last one of my students become mindless killers."

"But worst of all, I had to wake up in a cold, watery box and find out that two hundred years had passed since then, and that by now my entire species has been imprisoned."

The farther away I got from Miss Marie, the more afraid I became.

_It'll be alright, sweetheart._

_Just keep running._

When she told me to, I jumped down into a pocket in the floor in a little alcove at the end of the hallway. I was supposed to wait until the coast was clear.

_I'm so sorry we had to do this to you, sweetheart._

**I got this idea while walking around at Walmart. I'm rather proud of it.**

**I'd suggest reading "Click", the story I submitted a few days ago, which will help understand this one. However, it isn't necessary.**

**By the way, if you read "Click", and it showed up the same as "Duct Tape", it's because I accidentally submitted the wrong document. But I fixed it. It's better now.**

**There will be a lot of Kami, Spirit, Stein, Marie, Blair, and Angela. And an OC, non Mary Sue.**

**Extra awesomeness points and a mention in the next chapter if you can guess who Cara is.**


	2. Angel of Madness

**Author's note: Something I forgot to mention last chapter. This will be a pseudo-cross between the manga, the anime, and Soul Eater N.O.T.!. Spartoi exists, and Mifune will be a teacher at the DWMA/Shibusen(as his death in the manga was uncertain), Maka will (SPOILER ALERT) be part weapon, and Blair will be the more sisterly figure she is in the manga. Plus, Clay, Akane, Meme, Anya, and Tsugumi are all present in Spartoi.**

**Just thought that was something y'all should be aware of.**

**EDIT: No. Not anymore. I changed it. Mifune is dead and has been, because I don't want to confuse the two series. However, Maka is still part weapon, as it is an essential part of this story. **

TWO HUNDRED YEARS EARLIER

_-Maka-_

Dinner was eaten in silence. Everyone was deep in thought. Even Blair, surprisingly.

We'd gotten two sets of news today.

One: Marie was pregnant.

Two: Angela had found out that Mifune was dead by Blackstar's hand.

It had just been a slip of the tongue from one of the guards, who saw the girl passing in the hallway.

So it had been a big day. Kim had sat rocking seven-year-old Angela for half an hour, when finally the little girl had run off to her dormitory, not to be seen since.

Dinner had been ramen noodles. Curry took too much energy for today.

"Any bets on which it'll be?" Soul asked finally.

"Professor Stein and Miss Marie's kid?" I asked, unsure if the correct title for the kind woman was still 'Miss' if using only her first name. "Weapon, I hope. Electricity-based arms are rare."

"Huh. Surprised you'd say that, being a cross yourself," he replied, rinsing his plate and leaving it in the sink.

"Well, it's not like it'll turn out like me. We hope not," I noted. "The only reason my weapon gene awakened was because I was infected with the black blood. From you. And since the Professor has such fragile sanity in the first place, his child probably won't either, so he-slash-she might not be able to control it."

"I meant, you're a meister," Soul replied. "Primarily."

"Blair-chan doesn't care what kind of person she is," Blair informed us. "Blair just thinks it's good Marie gets to have a baby. She is a very nice person, and is a wonderful mother for Crona, even though she is only Crona's adopted mother." She grinned at us.

It always puzzled me that Blair was several hundred years old and not only kept the appearance of a young woman, but continued to speak only in broken, childish sentences. Not that she lacked intelligence, though one would think so upon first meeting her. She was actually quite insightful at times, such as when she wasn't acting like a stereotypical blonde ditz with an unhealthy passion for those of the opposite gender. I reminded her often that her hair was purple, please act like it, but she just gave me a puzzled glance and walked away every time.

In the four years since she'd moved in with us, I'd come to accept that Blair was a permanent fixture in our household. It had come to the point where I'd stopped being so surprised when she walked around the apartment stark naked, even when we had company. She burned every meal she ever prepared, and she got cat hair everywhere, but deep in my heart I loved the girl I'd come to think of as the closest thing I'd ever have to an older sister.

Blair wiped off the kitchen table while I washed dishes and Soul made a list of everything we needed from the grocery store. After she was done, our resident plumette promptly transformed into a small cat and jumped up onto the table she'd just cleaned.

I will never understand.

"Walking by," Soul told me as he tried to pass me in the slim hallway, but I'd already moved out of the way.

After a few minutes, Soul returned. "I have to go to the grocery store."

"I thought you were going tomorrow."

"Unless you want to spend the night without toilet paper, I'm still going," he replied.

I giggled a little bit, despite the unfortunate possible scenario he'd suggested. "All righty then. I'll take a shower while you're gone, the shop's just down the street." I looked at him. "It is your turn, right?"

"Yeah."

"Ok. Seeya in ten," I said, walking towards our one bathroom, tripping on the way. As I was falling, Soul caught my shoulder and prevented me from smashing my face on a doorknob.

He held up a wire. "Oh, lookie. Your iPod cable made you trip. It's a sign; you have to stop listening to that dubstep crap."

"Ha, ha." I glared at him, then slammed the bathroom door in his face.

"Have fun!" He called through the door.

I sighed.

"Blair-chan will go with Soul-kun to the grocery store so that Blair is not lonely here and Soul is not walking alone at night," I heard Blair squeak from the living room.

"Yeah, ok. I'll ride; you can fly on one of your freaky pumpkin things. Whatever."

"YOU GUYS HAVE FUN TOO!" I called to them dryly through the door. I heard them leave.

I stayed in the shower for longer than usual, enjoying the feeling of the hot water running down my back. Steam gathered, and my skin turned pink, but I didn't care. After a few minutes, though, the heat ran out, and I just turned off the spigot.

The feeling came right as I was getting dressed. I was already in my pajamas, and it knocked the feet out from under me.

Soul.

I caught my breath and struggled to stand up against the impossible weight that seemed to press on me from all around. I stumbled out the door and ran down all four flights of stairs, fighting a blackness that danced at the edges of my vision. When I reached the parking lot, a small black cat was lying in the middle of the road.

"Blair?" I asked, picking up the small creature, recognizing the small white mark on her forehead that was usually hidden by her hat.

She wasn't wounded, physically, as far as I could see. There was no blood, she was just unconscious. One yellow eye slowly opened and blinked at me.

"Where's Soul?" I asked her, panicked.

She didn't get to respond, though, because I saw something lying on the ground a few feet off.

We are raised essentially from birth to find a person to trust above all else. And when we find that person, we are taught that their life is in our hands and that our lives are in theirs.

I was nine years old when I met the small albino boy who at that time had been known as Soul Evans. A week later, we'd moved into a school-supplied dorm a little ways from the Academy, and had never once been apart for more than an hour and a half at a time since. Not in almost eight years.

So when I saw that empty red and black scythe lying on the side of the road, the world disappeared.

I stared at it. I saw. There was no soul there. No soul, no Soul.

I picked it up. It hummed a bit at my touch, but fell lifeless after that.

I didn't feel my knees give out, but I felt my calves hit the gravel. My hands clasped and unclasped around the almost foreign object, searching for a sign of life. There was nothing.

It started raining. How cliché.

Dr. Stein would have loved to see this. He would have wanted to see how a weapon could be empty. Not a dead soul within, but still leave a body. It was once considered impossible. Apparently, not anymore.

_Look at you._

I looked up. That was the voice of the Little Demon.

_You lose the boy, and now look what you've become._

I thought that voice was gone.

_Pathetic._

"Go away," I told it.

_What are you gonna do, make me?_

"I can't deal with you right now, just shut up!" I shouted to the nothingness. Blair, who had begun to approach, stepped back a bit.

_That's right. You can't make me. You're not strong enough. Not by yourself!_

That horrible sing-songy voice.

_Come on, you know you're thinking it._

"What?" I spat.

_How are you going to go on?_

I didn't give the stupid creature the pleasure of an answer.

I looked down at my lap. I hadn't really realized I was crying; it didn't matter right now. But the tears themselves almost gave me a heart attack over the pseudo one I was already having.

They were black.

"Blair!" I called. The small cat looked up, eyes wide. "I need you to go find Blackstar. Now." She stared at me. "NOW!"

She was gone in an instant, a large glowing pumpkin disappearing into the sky.

The pounding around me was excruciating. It only got worse. I knew from stories I'd heard that harm or death of a weapon's soul could tear their meister apart, but this pain was so much worse than I'd thought.

I'd never prepared myself for this. No matter what he said about his damned "duty to protect me", I had had no intention of ever letting Soul get a paper cut. Maybe a hit to the head with a hardcover book here and there, but I and I alone had that privilege. He was my weapon; he was my responsibility.

And now I was holding a lifeless stick.

"What happened?" Came a voice. "I ran all the way here." Blackstar dropped his kusarigama and Tsubaki appeared.

"I don't know. I just came out here, and... There's no soul." I gritted my teeth and cleared my head. I didn't have just my emotions to think about here, I had to figure out what had happened.

It was so hard.

"What do you mean? Where is he?"

"I don't know! It's empty!" I screamed, and my blue-haired companion fell to his knees. Tsubaki put her arms around me, but it did nothing for the pain. It was so hard to stay conscious I could barely feel her presence. "You'll have to kill me," I told him.

"What?"

"I'm going mad, and soon I'll kill you if you don't. Or rather, my body will kill you." It hurt to say the words, but I had to. Wasn't the Little Demon right? It would be so hard to go on. I just didn't know how. "I was going to ask Blair, but I felt so much pain coming off of her, and I knew she wasn't strong enough to do it."

"Maka, I can't kill you. What are you, crazy already?" He demanded.

"No, but that's my point. I can't control the Black Blood." I slashed my hand with a blade from my arm and showed him where the obsidian liquid spewed out. "I can't do this without Soul."

There was silence for a good long while. We all knew it was true, and I was just waiting for him to get it over with.

"We have to find it," Blackstar snapped all of a sudden.

"It's not here!" I told him.

"That's the point! Someone took it, and if we can find it we..."

"Blair! Get the others!" I screeched, jumping to my feet. There is hope there is hope there is hope there is hope.

"On it!" And she was gone again.

I collapsed. I was so weak. So used to having that extra energy all the time that the moment it was gone I couldn't stand.

It felt like an eternity later that Tsugumi Harudori helped me to my feet, and Kim put a hand over my heart.

"Don't," I told her. "Don't take away the pain. Please."

She put her hand down.

"Everybody listen!" Blackstar shouted, and for once, everyone did. "Maka is really, really good at finding people, right?"

We nodded.

"So all of us are going to make a resonance link, and we're going to give her the power to find Soul, all right?"

"LET'S DO THIS!" Patty shouted, and glowed pink before transforming.

One by one, all of the weapons changed forms, and each meister put a hand on one of my shoulders. Crona quietly sobbed but put a hand on mine. I gripped my scythe and tried to form a link.

But Soul was always the center of it, wasn't he?

His music.

It couldn't work without his music, could it?

"Ragnarok!" Crona exclaimed, once realizing what was wrong. "Scream!"

A bloodcurdling screech filled the air, but it worked.

I felt Patty grasping for hope, the quiet determination of Anya, Tsubaki, and Kid, the more desperate struggle in Blackstar, the pain-driven steel that had miraculously appeared inside Crona. I knew them all.

We could do this.

We could.

_Look at you all._

_So much pain._

It was Kid who looked at me. Meme peered around curiously, wondering where the voice was coming from. Akane's eyes went wide with shock as he connected the dots.

I knew I had to make this fast. I couldn't risk spreading the black blood to all of them. The surge in power ebbed the pain, and I began my search.

I didn't know where to start. My hesitation is what did us all in.

_Oh, this is so much easier than I'd thought. Thank you._

It was Patty, surprisingly, that went first. She started giggling, and I didn't know why. Her laughter morphed to a low, quiet, sadistic chuckle, and I tried to push Kid away as I realized what had happened. But Kid, too, was gone, his need for balance replaced with an endless greed for destruction. Liz was gone, feeling everything as a threat to her, Kid, and especially her sister. She wanted too badly to protect them, and soon all hope for her was lost.

Meme was next. I had expected her to be one of the most fragile. Her grip tightened on my shoulder, assertive but too much so.

Right after her was Anya. She and Soul had gotten along rather well, and she was far less optimistic than the others. She had lost the belief that we were capable of finding him, and she was gone. Tsugumi really, really tried to stay sane, but she was dragged in with her meister.

It was all dominoes from there.

At the loss of Tsugumi, Akane tried to pull her out but got sucked in as well, with Clay in tow. Kim, unable to supply energy and healing powers to all of us after such a sudden loss of half our forces, went down, and naturally Jackie lost it.

Ox fell to Akane's fate once Kim went under, and Kilik, trying to control his two weapons who didn't understand what was going on, exhausted himself.

Blackstar was so desperate, but he eventually lost the battle as well. His struggle to prove himself became a hunger to control the rest of us, and Tsubaki's ever-supportive attitude fueled him.

I guess it was he who knocked down Crona.

It didn't seem like Crona would last the longest, but I guess their longtime struggle with the black blood gave Ragnarok the edge. Then I realized- if Ragnarok was the one linking us together, the madness in me flowed through him and he would fall last before I would.

So when Crona went mad, I felt like my soul itself was being ripped apart. The pounding was one thing, but now I was actually being torn and stretched within myself.

I had to break away. I shook, but their hands held fast.

I went down.

But not before I saw where Soul's soul was.

It was so obvious.

Why hadn't I known?

**The end!**

**Well, until next time. In a week or so?**

**Yes, I referenced Maka's liking of music Soul doesn't. We don't know what she listens to, but we do know it can't be jazz or classical. But I like dubstep. So dubstep it is.**


	3. Angel of Innocence

_**Before you read this, go back to chapter two and read the first few paragraphs again. I want this to be less confusing, so it's completely manga-based. Although I am keeping Maka as a weapon because it is impossible to have this story without that element. **_

Lily- Age Seven

It was cold outside.

I rubbed my hands together and pressed them to my nose, which had lost all feeling even before I left the school building.

I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the food notes Mother had given me, and turned the corner towards the General Supply. Dead leaves blew down the cobblestone streets, and officers stood in groups of two or three at the front of a few shop units that had been closed down before I was born.

I entered the old building where everything was stored, and got into Line 5, as per usual. There was a new lady at the desk today. She didn't seem any happier to be here than the last one.

"Classification?" She asked, not looking up from what she was doing.

"W. MacIntyre family, block C, building 42, unit 51." I told her.

The clerk grumbled to herself and entered the information I'd given. A receipt printed from a slit in her desk, and she handed it to me. "Take that to the back room, someone will be there to get the goods for ya, hon. Next!"

I took the receipt to the back, and retrieved the pound of protein solution, cup of assorted flavor solution, and 400-pill bottle that my mother had requested on the notes she'd given me this morning.

We were supposed to take the pills every day. I had tried not taking them once, and I had gotten a massive headache. When I'd visited the nurse, she told me I was just reacting to not taking the pills for once, and I was lucky I didn't become sick.

Later, I'd found out exactly what "sick" meant.

Some had decided not to take the pills at all, and had had some sort of rabid reaction. They frothed at the mouth, and their eyes twitched independently from each other. Some were even violent. The officers usually ended up putting them down, and their bodies were immediately covered and taken to the incinerator.

It was getting dark, and I knew Mother would be irritated if I wasn't home soon. I touched my hand to my ear, and my music implants turned on. I made hand motions to select a song, and soon I had turned up the volume quite a bit more than I should have.

It was a mistake.

I didn't hear the sick person come up from behind me.

I felt something huge on my back, and suddenly all of its weight was on me. It grabbed for my chest with one hand, and the other held a knife. I couldn't tell if he was trying to stab me or take my groceries.

I panicked. I was small even for a seven-year-old, and I'd taken a back road, so there were no officers. Likely, though, they would've killed me if necessary to get to the sick person on my back.

I sensed the monstrous thing was hungry, but angry and fearful. He moved like he was desperate, but confident that he could get what he wanted from me.

The free hand closed around my throat, and the knife aimed for my heart.

I guess he didn't want my groceries.

Suddenly, I felt a searing pain down my back, like I was being burned, but it soon subsided. Warm liquid, black in the moonlight, dripped onto the ground, and the knife clattered on the cobblestone. What was left of the man slumped to the ground with four giant slits clear through his torso.

At first I was relieved, until I realized that I did not know where the four slits had come from. I looked around, and caught my reflection in a nearby window.

I was covered in blood, and the top of my uniform was a bit more loose than usual, because the back was torn in multiple places. The groceries dangled from my hand, and something was hanging over my head. When I moved, it moved with me.

I stepped closer to the window, the thing shining in the moonlight, more blood slowly dripping off of it. I saw that it was… attached to my back, I think, and that there were more of them.

Turning, I realized they were long, black and silver blades that curved, two from my shoulder over my head, and two from my lower back that stuck straight out like spikes. I looked like some sort of demonic butterfly.

High above me in the sky, the moon drooled blood down onto the city.

-Cara-

It was like a castle, only much smaller.

It was only two stories, maybe three, and there were arrows and odd lines with short sticks crossing them painted over the concrete blocks that made up the building, which was shaped like a bunch of arrows pointing upward.

Ms. Marie held my hand as we walked through the gate. "Welcome to the Patchwork Laboratory," she whispered to me.

Azusa walked directly before us, arms and back straight as the arrows that covered the odd house. She had barely spoken during our entire trip.

I had waited in the hallway at the museum for what felt like forever, until the rest of the visitors had gone home. Ms. Marie had returned after the lights had gone out, and taken my hand. We'd used the teleport in the lobby to connect to one at a town hall somewhere in the desert, where Azusa met us. The three of us then walked through the sand until long after the moon had appeared above us. The whole time, I'd held on to the nice woman with the honey- yellow eye and tried to remain calm.

But even Ms. Marie's healing touch could not prepare me for the girl that had dropped seemingly out of the sky to land, standing, between Azusa and I.

"Is this her?" She asked, kneeling to brush my hair back, as she adjusted the wide black hat on her head. "She's-"

"No, Blair. I'm sorry. This one is mi- I mean, the other one. Her name is Cara." Ms. Marie told her.

She was by far the oddest person I'd ever seen. Her eyes were a pale yellow-gold, not so different from Ms. Marie's. Her hair was a deep purple, as were her long fingernails. She wore a black jumpsuit and black high-heeled boots.

Her face fell at what the older woman had said, but she quickly smiled at me again and sprang to her feet. "Should Blair go tell Miss Kami anyway?"

"Would you?" Miss Marie smiled at Blair, and I could tell she didn't need to use any sort of wavelength to convince her.

"That poor girl," I thought I heard Miss Marie whisper.

We made it to the front porch of the building, as the door opened and another woman stepped out, followed closely by Blair.

"Hello," she said. "You must be Cara."

"Good evening," I smiled at her and bent my knees in a half-curtsy. "And what is your name?"

"Miriam Kami White, but you can call me Kami," she replied with the smile of a schoolteacher with her first class.

Much like the other women I'd met so far, she seemed very friendly. Her eyes were a dark green, and her hair was pulled into two looped pigtails. She was wearing an old, worn white shirt and dark green cargo pants. When she leaned forward to shake my hand I noticed the only thing that seemed slightly off about her.

She had no pupils.

Creepy, I thought. I looked at the woman for a moment, trying to figure out where I'd seen her before.

"Never talk to strangers," my mother had said, but I was positive I'd seen Kami White somewhere.

I wondered if she was one of the Shibusen weapons like Marie and Azusa. Who were the other ones? She Justin law, Spirit Albarn…

Albarn.

She looked just like Maka Albarn.

I gasped and hid behind Miss Marie's leg, peering up at the woman through my bangs.

"You're her," I whispered.

A small smile played on Miss Kami's lips, but she raised an eyebrow.

"Who? Who am I?" She asked me, sitting on the ground cross-legged.

"You're Maka Albarn, all grown up," I accused, pointing my finger at her. "You just changed your name!" But then I pulled my hand back and bit my lip.

Miss Kami gave a small, sad laugh. "No," she told me. "Maka Albarn is my daughter."

Lily

I ran all the way home, and because it was nighttime no one saw me and my odd winglike... things.

I made it to the living room, where Will, my twin, was sitting in the floor stacking cups. I was too short for the top blades to reach the ceiling, but I accidentally nicked the doorway on the way in.

"Will?" I asked, not sure if I should tell him about the odd experience but realized that hiding it was futile. I couldn't get them off.

"Hey, Lily... WHAT ARE THOSE." He looked up at me in shock.

"I don't know," I told him. "I was attacked by a sick person on the way home, and they just appeared."

"Can I see?" He asked.

"Uh-huh." I stripped off my jacket, having to rip it off over the blades. It seemed attached to the blades somehow. Like they'd grown in or something, I dunno.

I was sweating even though I was cold, and pulled off the head wrap and overshirt I was wearing also, so Will could look more easily.

"It's attached to the skin," he told me. "Should we tell Mother?"

"No. She'd take me to the doctors." I did not want to go back there.

Black dried blood was crusted all over me. I would have to take a quadruple bath tonight.

Will got up to put his cups away, and on the way back, he tripped.

He was about to fall on the blades that killed the sick man. _No, no, not my brother not Will NO!_

He fell on me, just as the blades disappeared.

I hugged him for a minute. This was good.

Somehow, I had controlled the blades.

Two Hundred Years Ago

Maka

_The streets of Death City were empty. There were no bustling crowds, no paper cups flying across the sidewalks, and the doors to the shops were wide open in welcome despite their absent owners._

"_Odd," Kidd commented, running his hand over a doorframe. "There's no one anywhere." _

_The fifteen of us walked silently down the road, not bothering to look for passing cars because all of us could feel that there would be no drivers. _

_I kept to the back of the group. There was an itching in my chest that I felt like clawing through my own rib cage to scratch. It was like something was supposed to be there but wasn't, and the void that remained was trying to find the rest of itself. _

_I coughed. I hacked like I had the flu. I thought maybe that could scratch it, but I just felt a horrible pain, as if I'd ripped off a scab. In my distraction I'd been separated from the rest of the group. So I just walked back to my apartment. Kidd or Ox would sense where I was. _

_I had no key, but the door was unlocked. I shut the door behind me and collapsed, crying for no apparent reason. Something. _

_I'd lost something. _

_There was a card on the wall. A picture of me from a Christmas card from several years ago that we'd sent out. _

_We?_

_There was just me in the picture. _

_I brushed off my brain's apparent lack of ability to correctly use pronouns. But when I began to walk away, I thought I saw someone else in the picture. _

_What was wrong with my brain?_

_Suddenly I spun, flipping something over in my hands. I looked down and saw that it was a broom. _

_Where did that broom come from?_

_I must've grabbed it from the corner. _

_I looked down again and the broom was gone. Why had I spun it so suddenly?_

_The window was open, I could see. I went to close it when I noticed that the moon was drooling blood again. Someone must have just died. _

_But the moon wasn't laughing, so it was an innocent person. _

_I started to run toward the door. "SOUL!" I called, reaching my hand toward the room down the hall. _

_I didn't know where that one syllable had come from, but it hurt my heart. I felt like I was being ripped apart from the inside. But what was this "Soul?"_

_Oh, right. Him._

_He'd left me, right? I could see him standing on the street across from me with that girl with the purple hair, telling me how he'd never be able to fight alongside a woman who had a body like mine. _

_No. No that wasn't it. _

_Even if that wasn't how it happened, the point was that he left. He was here before, but he was gone now. I sunk to the floor. _

_I saw the moon, still dripping blood. _

_I felt something warm and sticky on my face. Just for an instant, the image of my clean apartment vanished, and I saw another living room. Definitely my furniture, but blood streaked the walls and the bodies of Death City police officers littered the flat. _

_I saw the clean apartment again. The broom was in my hands. _

_No, stop. Go back. _

_It's not a broom. _

_Without meaning to, I ran out of the apartment and flew down the staircase. I willed myself to stop, but I couldn't. I could see now that the broom was a scythe, slick with the bodily fluids of those who stood in my way. I couldn't see who I was attacking, but sometimes I could hear splatters after each turn of the blade. _

_I ran down the street, where Kidd was waiting for me. He looked at me with a crazed look in his eyes, but blinked and the expression was gone. Patty crouched behind him, beating up an invisible person with her metallic fists._

_I spun the scythe again, and felt Anya at my back mirroring my movements. She laughed for a moment, uncharacteristic of her, and I noticed that her skirt was ripped up to her thigh. She'd hate that on any other day, but I could see that she, too, had figured out exactly why we'd lost control of our own bodies. _

_I blacked out then. _

_And when I woke up, we were all on the moon. _

_Looking down, I had changed into my black cloak. My body looked clean, but I knew it was only an illusion because I could feel grime all over me. I felt a humming in my chest, as if my soul were about to explode with excitement. _

_I wondered how many innocent spirits I'd devoured. _

_Everyone around me blinked at each other, and I knew they'd blacked out too. It was nighttime, and I could see that we were over a large city, New York, maybe? One look at Liz and Patty confirmed my suspicions. _

"_What are we doing here?" I heard Akane think._

_I heard him think. _

_That meant we were in resonance. Chatter buzzed incessantly around me, and we each glowed just a bit brighter. _

_We trekked through the nostrils of the moon, to its core. The moon was a center of balance for telepathic creatures of every kind, and manipulating it meant manipulating the world. _

_I stood next to one tooth, as did each of the others. Ten meisters at ten bottom teeth. Without making myself do it, I closed my eyes and connected to the moon, and the stone I was at, as well as the one above it glowed a dim blue. It was dark, inside the odd formation, but I could see fine. _

_I had already been connected to the moon, as all meisters and weapons were, but this last interaction had been me manipulating the moon directly._

_I ran out the back of the mouth and up, escaping through the nostril we'd come in through. The other Spartoi were close behind me. I looked down. _

_The lights were off, there were no cars on the streets, and there were no people. Just like Death City had been. But I willed myself to see past this illusion. If I couldn't have control of my body, at least I could have control of my mind. _

_Cars were crashed into each other, people were running and yelling, and trampled figures littered the sidewalks. I switched over my vision, and could see blue souls shaking in panic, many just waking up._

_Others weren't so innocent. I quickly filtered my search only to meisters and weapons, and to my horror my hypothesis was right. _

_I looked down at my own chest. Instead of blue wings sprouting from a bright ball of energy, the wings were solid black and oily, the orb they sprouted from an angry red and covered with scales. It had swelled to at least twice its size. _

_Looking at the others, I saw that each weapon was at least twice to three times as powerful as they had been this morning. We must've killed everyone in Death City. _

_I remembered my apartment building. Which of my neighbors were a part of me now? _

_I heard a little girl scream deep inside myself, and fell to my knees. _

_But that was nothing compared to the massacre down below. I flew down to the Empire State building, but I couldn't make myself help. The Kishin within me wouldn't allow that. _

_A brother and sister, about my age, ran out onto the street. The girl was a demon mirror, I could see, because everyone who looked at her in weapon form began to claw at their own eyes. _

_There weren't a lot of weapons and meisters in the world outside of Death City. But the few that lived here were doing a lot of damage, as one by one they all lost themselves and began attacking innocents. _

_A human police officer on the ground who had happened to be in the area took out his gun and shot a man in a janitor's uniform who was attacking him with flaming fists. _

_I gasped in shock as I realized what was wrong. The janitor fell to the ground, bleeding black everywhere. _

_Crona has infected Soul, and Soul had infected me. _

_And then I passed it to the rest of the Spartoi, and we passed it on to the moon. _

_And now every meister and weapon on Earth who had ever attended the DWMA was infected with the Black Blood, and unable to control themselves. _

_**Yes, Maka has to be a weapon for the purposes of this story because she has to eat souls. The only reason Asura could was because he had devoured his own weapon first- at least that's how I understood it. Besides, although I hated the ending to the anime, I loved the fight scene where she was a weapon.**_

**Reviews are cake, tomorrow's my birthday, and that cake is no lie. **


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